My main goals this week were to get a MIDI controller to control effects, to add menus for video selection, and to add more effects to my system. I accomplished 2 out of 3, but not for lack of trying!
MIDI Control of Effects
I successfully hooked up a MIDI controller to control 4 different effect parameters, and will be able to continue adding more. I followed this tutorial to learn how to use the “ctlin” object with MIDI and re-used this code for each of the effect sliders. My guess is that there is a more efficient way to do this, perhaps by increasing the number of inputs in my gate object to the number of parameters I’d like to control. I haven’t tried this yet, and I at least know that my current method will work if all else fails. The one downside to my approach that I’ve already seen is that I have to carefully “train” each slider object to recognize the right knob on my MIDI controller each time I load Max. If not done carefully, one knob can accidentally control multiple parameters (which could be very helpful, given the right intention!)
One more thing to improve: setting the right range for mapping values from the slider to the inputs into the effects patch. For example, the knob on my MIDI controller currently sends values from 0-127. I am re-mapping those to Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation. For each of those, I will need a range that goes from a negative value to a positive value. I re-mapped 0-127 to -500,500 initially; this range is probably too big, and doesn’t allow me much granularity close to 0. I’ll play with these ranges over the course of the week.
Adding Effects
I added the jit.op object in two places; one as feedback on the final video before output to the window, and one as the sum of two incoming videos. I am not sure that I have the feedback channel wired up properly right now; it’s possible that I am feeding in two video feeds and while one of them is receiving feedback, the other is coming in clean, leading to the blinking effect in the screen recording.
UMenu Fail
I did not, however, get the UMenu to work properly. I added filepaths to my File Preferences
And I added filenames without spaces to the the UMenu inspector option:
But when trying to load these into the patch, I was never able to successfully play any videos. I reverted back to just using the “read” object.
Last Thoughts
The added effects are nice, and I will continue to experiment with them. However, the biggest takeaway is that the source video can make a big difference. I used microscope-based videos and they lent a really interesting quality when simply overlaid. I want to be very familiar with the videos I have at my disposal, even moreso than the effects that I can apply, for my performance.